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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26994637">What Hath God Wrought</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/saretton/pseuds/saretton'>saretton</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>A lil bit of First This and a lil bit of First That apparently, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - War, Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Bathing together as one of the top 3 levels of intimacy, Bathing/Washing, Bathtubs, Biblical references and reinterpretation, Blizzards &amp; Snowstorms, Body Worship, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley Takes Care of Aziraphale (Good Omens), Established Relationship, First Kiss, First Meetings, First Time, Frostbite, I can't believe I might be the first to use this tag, I have written this thing for myself but you can read it too, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Making Love, POV Aziraphale (Good Omens), POV First Person, Questioning one's faith, Self-indulgence level 9000+, Telegraph AU, Telegraph Sex, They were pen pals but via Morse code, Wound tending if you squint, omg they were telegraphists, only Frances McDormand and my betas can judge me</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 23:55:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,310</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26994637</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/saretton/pseuds/saretton</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Do you remember, my darling, the early days when there were just fingers and air and sounds – a rhythmic beeping in the day, a frantic answer in the night? The orange glow of lamps. Coding and decoding. Choosing the words carefully, never too many, but always enough.</em><br/>-----<br/>A Good Omens Telegraph AU.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>184</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>307</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Best Aziraphale and Crowley, Good Omens Human AUs</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>What Hath God Wrought</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This AU comes from a one-time discussion on the Good Omens Events server exactly two months ago, so I must really thank all the lovely people that have inspired me and supported me while I wrote this.</p><p>Thanks to my lovely betas, <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheKnittingJedi/pseuds/TheKnittingJedi">TheKnittingJedi</a> and <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyracantha">Pyracantha</a>. Thank you thank you thank you for helping me smooth all the wrinkles of this story. You deserve not only the world, but multiple planetary systems. This fic wouldn't exist without you! And every mistake here is entirely my fault.</p><p><strong>IMPORTANT</strong>: you'll notice that the dialogues feature some abbreviations and prosigns which are typical of communication via wire. Make sure to check the footnotes to decode them. :D</p><p>The title comes from a Biblical quote (Numbers 23:23), which was also the official first Morse code message transmitted in the US on May 24, 1844 via the Baltimore–Washington telegraph line. However, please notice that the exact setting and time of this AU are purposefully kept vague (somewhere snowy, around the 1880 – 1900).</p><p>Enjoy! :)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>E studiavamo chiusi in una stanza –<br/>
la luce fioca di candele e lampade a petrolio;<br/>
e quando si trattava di parlare,<br/>
aspettavamo sempre con piacere;<br/>
e il mio maestro mi insegnò com’è difficile trovare l’alba dentro all’imbrunire.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>[And we used to study, locked in a room –<br/>
The feeble light of candles and oil lamps;<br/>
And when it came to talking,<br/>
We would always wait gladly;<br/>
And my teacher showed me how difficult it is to find the dawn inside the dusk.]</em>
</p><p>
  <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua7hUKFPMrk">Prospettiva Nevski</a> by Franco Battiato</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>The water is ready – warm and perfectly still like an ironed blanket. Not too hot for my meek temper, hot enough for your cold blood.</p><p>We get into the tub. I go first, resisting the temptation to sink in completely under the surface; then you join me, and you seem to keep watching me even when you turn away to adjust your back against my chest.</p><p>The water shifts around us; I hold you close in my arms. I want, and I hope, to be protective but gentle. Like a baby bird, you could fly away whenever you want from my hands. You don’t.</p><p>My palms rub softly against your thighs, then your chest, then your stomach, and again and again in an endless cycle; and you follow them with your own hands, with a sly smile that I feel pressed against my jaw and neck.</p><p>Sometimes you say that I’m the padding against the edges of your life. It’s nice to know. I’ll never get tired of hearing you say that.</p><p>You, silent, smiling, surprising you.</p><p>Every day I feel there’s something new I can learn from you. I should watch more closely and pay more attention. I wish I could learn faster; I was never fast, but I can be for you and give you something of me in return. You’ll teach me the excitement of speed; I’ll teach you slowness and stillness, honed in half a lifetime of knowing them and acting them out.</p><p>It may happen that something you’re very familiar with shifts to become a different thing, and you’ll have to make sense of this change to keep that thing with you; you’ll have to find its new place in your world. This is what happened with my Christian faith and you, my darling. Blasphemous as it might sound, I thought I’d lost it, but it had only changed its colours. I found my new faith in you.</p><p>I had always been a believer (my parents had made sure of that), but after the war broke out, my faith gradually slipped away. How could it not? The irrationality of it all did a number on me. It didn’t take long before I found shelter in agnosticism.</p><p>But even among my mounting doubts, I couldn't forget the love contained in some passages of the Bible. Those stayed deeply rooted in me, and made sense once I started to know you.</p><p><em>(</em> <em>For I was hungry and you gave me food.)</em></p><p>The bathroom is quick to be filled with steam. The slight fog wraps the two of us and my memories up in a gentle blanket. With a kiss to your hair, my mind starts one of its favourite journeys.</p><p>Do you remember, my darling, the early days when there were just fingers and air and sounds – a rhythmic beeping in the day, a frantic answer in the night? The orange glow of lamps. Coding and decoding. Choosing the words carefully, never too many, but always enough.</p><p>Do you remember when we still hadn't shared a tub or a bed, when the snow wasn't falling and you still hadn't taken me in – warmed my feet and rubbed my hands and thawed my heart?</p><p>No faces. No voices. Only words flying in the sky, running in the moonlight. From pole to pole, under the clouds, above the earth, among the birds.</p><p>Words in the air, on the wire between you and me.</p><p>Do you remember, my love?</p><p>The warm water drips from your fingers now, as you play with it lazily; now, as you lie against my chest in the bathtub we like so much. Now. No more delays. No more borders or soldiers or wars.</p><p>Drip, drip, drip.</p><p>Tap, tap, tap.</p><p>From behind you I take your hand and lace our fingers together. A bundle of intersecting dashes. You have long fingers, love, lighter than mine – made to tap the key faster and reach out quicker to me. You have always been the quick one.</p><p>Our point of contact, as wide as your back against my chest, is warm with body heat and it’s real, we can touch it. Real and warm as the words that we bounced back and forth, letter by letter, condensed to the highest degree. We can speak full and slow now; we can hear.</p><p>But we're still familiar with silence stretching between us. Back then it was normal and unsettling. Was I clear enough? Should I repeat? Will he answer? Is he still listening?</p><p>We're here now, we're together. Quietness doesn't scare us anymore. It can be our friend. A cat gently purring in front of a fireplace. We have spent months tapping sentences, cutting them out in the air with thick scissors and dull knives. Now we are learning to touch and enjoy the silence, and when we talk, we chat too much. There is no in between anymore.</p><p>I still remember that first evening after you had saved me, when I was fully recovered. Touching. Learning. Wondering. The fist <sup><a href="#_ftn1" id="_ftnref1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a></sup> I had learned to know with my ears now had unexpected, miraculous physicality. I spent an hour admiring your hands. Their palm lines. Their bone weight. Their texture, their colour. Their freckles, specks hoarded and scattered like stars and galaxies following mysterious paths. The way your nails were bitten with fury and anxiety (not anymore, love, never more of that). The way your knuckles crack at every twist. The way your pulse beats under your wrist – a current of 'A's.</p><p>Dot, dash; dot, dash.</p><p>Anthony; Anthony.</p><p>You always say that it's the contrary – that it's really 'Aziraphale; Aziraphale'. Funny how I always say the same thing about my own pulse, how I know it beats with the 'A's of Anthony.</p><p><em>(</em> <em>I was thirsty and you gave me drink.)</em></p><p>During the war, I never cared much about the border until they assigned me to that telegraph station inside a little house. It was just a war border, I thought. Miles and miles of barbed wire. Soldiers to guard it – forget-me-not and cream uniforms on my side, crimson and black on the other (on yours).</p><p>The war had been dragging on for a little less than a year when I arrived there from the city. My job was easy, for a telegraphist: to receive the war bulletins, decode them, type them down quickly and hang them on the message board outside of my house, or mail them, though I would hand them out personally whenever I could.</p><p>It wasn’t as frantic as I expected. Not at all. The house was just outside of a village of a few thousand people, maybe less; sometimes the recipients were children and elders who had seen too little or too much of the world, and to whom those notices made little difference. That village was the beginning and the end of their world; beyond the border, another world started.</p><p>I’d always thought that my head office had appointed me to that job as a punishment or a curse. I had no-one to pass the message to, no colleagues at least. There was no strategic point in that quiet place. I was just at the receiving end, and the messages I had to send back – reports and other small communications – were extremely sparse. Few people spent money on trying to contact their loved ones when they could use it to buy food instead. They would just pray for their safety and hope for the best.</p><p>Many men in the country had enrolled as soldiers and were away, far away from their hearths, fighting somewhere. Probably never to return. Dozens from the village were on the front too, of course. From time to time, part of my job was to tell those good-hearted and peaceful people that their fathers and sons and husbands and friends wouldn’t come back anymore.</p><p>Back then, the wire was a cruel instrument made to carry numbers and names and orders at the speed of sound.</p><p>I was lonely. I think I had always been. Still, it gets even lonelier, when the only messages you receive are made of numbers and deaths and you can’t really find your place in the crowd of the living. Now and again, when the lack of someone who’d <em>understand</em> became too poignant and bitter, I would sit down, grab my headset and listen for new stations. I’d be on the lookout for them, hoping to find a fist that wasn’t my own or Uriel’s, from the previous station back in town.</p><p>If the sentries at the border knew what was going on, they didn’t show. Nobody had bothered to pull down the pole connecting the two borders through telegraph wires. It stood there, lonely and steadfast, exactly on the border, and was now wrapped in a makeshift cover of barbed wire. During clear days I could glance at its summit in the distance and look at the birds that, like tiny dots, came to rest there from time to time.</p><p>In the grand scheme of the war, it looked as weak as a toothpick; a single point of contact between two worlds suddenly at war, two sides that had been united just some months before. Somehow it was as if people had forgotten it was even there. It had been built to spread communication, but it ended up being parked at the end of each world.</p><p>Thinking about it, perhaps, my boss would have liked me to listen in to some enemy conversation. Grasp some secret plot to overthrow the Empire or whatever. Or perhaps he really just wished to send me away. He never bothered to check closely, after all; the reassurance that the people were promptly informed of the war news was enough for him, and that was it. And I’ve come to think that he actually thought of me as incompetent, despite my skills as a telegraphist for which, like all our colleagues, I was paid quite well.</p><p>(If only he had known the miraculous conversations we had through the wire, love. In just a few words, we always got to the point, always digging a little deeper into each other, like roots stretching down to feed their tree…)</p><p>One day, finally, I heard it.</p><p>The peculiar beeping of a new fist. CQ… CQ… CQ<sup><a href="#_ftn2" id="_ftnref2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a></sup>. A request of contact.</p><p>I didn’t know the exact distance of that new station from my house yet. I hoped it wouldn’t be too far, so that I could meet this new colleague in person, share our experiences, a couple of tricks and inside jokes of the profession, and reassure each other on the fact that, well, surely the war couldn’t last much longer now…</p><p>But then, I thought – what if this person is on the other side? Would it be alright to make contact just to make sure of that? Would I be accused of treason? For all I knew, this new station could have been a test one, or a trap, on either side. I had no way to know or to make sure immediately.</p><p>I’d never even ventured very close to the border to check what was there. I was scared. There were rumours about the sentries being particularly zealous in stopping anyone who dared come too close. On both sides. Not only was crossing the border impossible; it was also dangerous to get too close to it.</p><p>Either way, <em>someone</em> was trying to contact me, and I could be the only station in close proximity for all I knew. It was my duty to answer. At least it seemed the right thing to do.</p><p>“134,<sup><a href="#_ftn3" id="_ftnref3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a></sup>”</p><p>you asked as soon as I made contact and tapped K<sup><a href="#_ftn4" id="_ftnref4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a></sup>; because you always ask. You’re always full of questions.</p><p>I hesitated again. Really, was it safe? It could have been anybody. (Never would I have imagined that it would be <em>you</em>.)</p><p>After a good minute, I finally gave in. My finger started tapping, almost like it had a will of its own.</p><p>“DE<sup><a href="#_ftn5" id="_ftnref5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a></sup> AZIRAPHALE FELL 134”</p><p>“DE ANTHONY CROWLEY”</p><p>I didn’t know that name, but that didn’t mean anything. I should have been warned about a potential new colleague by Uriel or the head office. Especially during a conflict. Then again, they never warned me of anything.</p><p>I panicked slightly, in a very controlled way – firmly sitting on my chair as if I had been glued to it. Maybe I had been too hasty in revealing my name. Too in need of someone else to talk to, someone who could relate to what I was going through. Someone who would understand…</p><p>All of a sudden, I realised that finally, <em>finally</em>, I had found someone to pass my messages to, one way or another. I wouldn’t be the end of the line anymore. If only once.</p><p>Gingerly, already knowing the answer in my heart, I asked,</p><p>“QTH?<sup><a href="#_ftn6" id="_ftnref6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a></sup>”</p><p>A few minutes passed – you hesitated like I did. Then…</p><p>“QTH…”</p><p>And when I received your coordinates I knew that I <em>was</em> doing something dangerous.</p><p>But excitement made me act before I could think better about it. Espionage has never been my cup of tea; I think I’ve never been subtle, though I tried very hard all my life. On instinct, I told you where I was in turn. I gave my own position away.</p><p>“OPPOSITE SIDES,”</p><p>I remember my message also said, needlessly clarifying the concept. I hoped to make it sound like a warning. <em>Beware, stranger</em>, it said; <em>if we go on, you know what’s at stake should we be caught</em>. And yet, it also whispered, <em>Please. Let’s talk anyway.</em> <em>Reach out again. Let’s be friends despite it all.</em></p><p>A minute passed. I thought the whole thing would end there; I thought you’d realise your mistake. That was it. You’d never seek contact anymore.</p><p>I was about to take my headset off, wrapping myself again in my cocoon of loneliness. Perhaps forever. But then…</p><p>“WENT DOWN LIKE A LEAD BALLOON”</p><p>Anthony, love… When you sent me that message I did something I hadn’t done for a long time. I laughed.</p><p>I felt encouraged to go on. The itch to tap back an answer was there in my fingers; it already felt like a conversation. I could feel your wit. It was all there, in just one sentence. Still, it also felt like you had something else to say.</p><p>I waited. Fidgeted with some transcripts on the table. Adjusted the position of my headset. Waited some more.</p><p>Another minute passed, and the message came ringing in my ears.</p><p>“BUT YOU DID NOTHING WRONG”</p><p>“TU<sup><a href="#_ftn7" id="_ftnref7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a></sup> HOPE SO,”</p><p>I replied, and if I already felt warm, you won me over with the next handful of words.</p><p>“BET YOU COULD NEVER”</p><p>From that moment, as the conversation developed, spring took roots outside our windows, among the corpses and the tombstones and the future war memorials. From that moment, I was fraternizing with the enemy. We both were. Sending telegrams beyond the border, what was I thinking? What were <em>we</em> thinking?</p><p>Perhaps you were just as lonely as I was. (And you told me. You were.)</p><p>I stopped wondering whether I was doing the right thing. I just talked, and you talked back to me. There was no trace of war or hatred in those messages. Not ever. They were brisk and to the point, they were quiet and unostentatious. Curious and warm and tentative. They sounded like a hand looking for a wall to lean on in the darkness.</p><p>Trying to picture each other through endless amounts of wires might have always been the hardest part for both of us. You told me you’re a redhead. Bony. With a hooked nose, and freckles, and eyes sensitive to the light of the lamp of your living room.</p><p>I told you of my hair, of my soft body that had always made me a little self-conscious, and of the fact that, not knowing as much as I would like about fashion, I probably dress like my father, but I don’t mind.</p><p>“WHY?”</p><p>you asked.</p><p>“I HAVE STANDARDS,”</p><p>I answered.</p><p>I imagined you chuckled at the other end of the wire, but now I know that you never really cared about it. Everything looks beautiful to you, my love. You wouldn’t know what to do with my silly so-called standards even if you tried. You were born free and questioning – one of the many reasons why I love you. I’m learning from you, but it takes time.</p><p>Months passed. The war went on. Nobody seemed to check up on us. We kept our correspondence. We exchanged wires every week; then every few days; then every day, whenever possible. Alone at the end of our lines, our head offices ignoring us, without anyone to really talk to, we learned our usual schedules, our lunch and dinner times, our moments of wakefulness and of sleep. (You’ve always slept a lot more than me, haven’t you?)</p><p>Word after word, we fell together in a soft world of peace and quiet, a safe space in the middle, above the barbed wire of the border.</p><p>There’s one particular conversation I replayed again and again in my head until I learned it by heart. All its dots and dashes flow tidily in my mind, letter by letter.</p><p>It was one of those lonesome evenings, quiet times when no regular bulletins were expected. We would still hang around our stations in case of sudden and urgent messages; an excuse like any other to build up the courage to send the first string of sounds, making the first move. This time, you started it.</p><p>"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"</p><p><em>Well</em>, I thought, <em>some imagination and humour can’t do any harm… Let’s see…</em></p><p>"OBVIOUSLY DINING AT THE RESTAURANT BEEN WAITING"</p><p>"LONG?"</p><p>"N<sup><a href="#_ftn8" id="_ftnref8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a></sup>"</p><p>"FOR ME?"</p><p>My heart melted like butter.</p><p>"C<sup><a href="#_ftn9" id="_ftnref9" name="_ftnref9">[9]</a></sup>"</p><p>"WHAT IS ON THE MENU TODAY?"</p><p>(My stomach growled. Why not tap my biggest cravings, trying to make them go away?)</p><p>"OYSTERS AND CREPES AND FINE WINE"</p><p>"NEVER EATEN AN OYSTER"</p><p>A pause.</p><p>"WILL TAKE COFFEE INSTEAD"</p><p>"EXCELLENT CHOICE CHEERS MY DEAR"</p><p>"CHEERS ANGEL"</p><p><em>Angel</em>.</p><p>You’ve always called me that, after then. Surely ‘Aziraphale’ is a mouthful, and it takes too long to tap. You also told me that writing only my initial could be confusing, and it would sound too impersonal. So you came up with ‘angel’, and ‘angel’ it stayed.</p><p>I have no intention of complaining about it, ever. Your face lights up every time you say that word. The corners of your lips jump up and curl inside irresistible dimples. I never feel more loved than when you call me that name.</p><p>We had endless conversations like that one. The months were long, the seasons changed, the war dragged itself on.</p><p>Words came naturally between us, but at times I felt the need to choose them carefully, and I bet you did too. When it takes several seconds to send a single word, the best course of action is to think long and hard about what to say. It’s better to make no mistakes. Truth be told, I used to apply this principle not only to wires, but also to everyday actions. Before doing anything, I used to think about it long and hard, and I would only do something when I was absolutely certain of it.</p><p>The only time I didn’t think at all before doing something was when, that day in late winter, I received The Message from Uriel.</p><p>“ARMISTICE SIGNED STOP<sup><a href="#_ftn10" id="_ftnref10" name="_ftnref10">[10]</a></sup> WAR IS OVER STOP CEASE FIRE STOP OPEN BORDERS STOP”</p><p>This, actually, wasn’t an unexpected wire. The armistice had been in the air for weeks. Everyone had been anticipating it. Still, I almost fell off my chair when I heard the message.</p><p>It was over. No more sentinels, no more barbed wire, no more borders.</p><p>I stumbled off the chair, launching myself to hang the message on the notice board out of my house, behind the glass for everyone to read.</p><p>Winter had chosen that particular day to unleash the worst blizzard of the decade. The wind and the snowflakes lashed at me, but I didn’t feel any of it.</p><p>I ran back inside. Somehow managing to sit down, I put my headphones back on and I started tapping faster than I ever did. Almost as fast as you do. You needed to know.</p><p>The snow twirled outside of the window, in a frenzied and uncaring waltz.</p><p>I waited. One minute. Two. I tried again.</p><p>There was no answer. Not a beep.</p><p>I could still send messages back to the station before mine. I tested it. Twice, much to Uriel’s great irritation. No way to send the signal forward, then. This could mean many things.</p><p>You could have been killed. But by whom? Unlikely. Besides, the dread this idea gave me made me put it aside immediately.</p><p>You could have been transferred. But why, since staying at that station was your curse as much as mine?</p><p>A pole could have fallen down… and, well – not a pole. <em>That</em> pole, the one between you and me, on the border. I looked out of the window and I gulped. Now that was… likely. And still scary. Were you alright? Was that why you weren’t answering?</p><p>I had to make sure you were fine. And you needed to know that it was all over, that we were free. You had probably received the message already from your side, but… what if the snowstorm had cut you off?</p><p>The thought that I had no exact idea of what you looked like, that your face was only of a self-portrait made of words didn’t even cross my mind. I <em>had</em> to meet you. We deserved it. Months and months, and now that we finally could…</p><p>I drew the white lace curtains in the kitchen to peek out of the window. I couldn’t see much. Snow and snow and snow…</p><p>It was only three miles from my house to yours. Three miles and your coordinates imprinted in my mind, and a simple, straight route that I had studied all too well on a map. I could do it. I had to let you know. I had to meet you, I had to –</p><p>“ARMISTICE SIGNED STOP WAR IS OVER STOP CEASE FIRE STOP OPEN BORDERS STOP”</p><p>I wore every piece of clothing I could find as the wind howled and growled on my door. I left a hasty message on my table to state my intention to cross the border, and I stepped outside. The blizzard greeted me and seemed to laugh in my face. I ignored it and started walking. Three miles.</p><p>I had not taken into account the weather slowing me down, of course. Halfway through, I was already half frozen. The pole on the border had indeed fallen down, taking part of the barbed wire with it and becoming something like a wooden bridge. Hoisting myself clumsily on it, I crossed the border easily, walking on the wood to avoid the metal thorns and knots all around.</p><p>The sentries were already gone. The passage was unguarded. Somehow I managed to climb back down, and I found myself in another country. I treaded on.</p><p>Without really feeling the tip of my nose anymore, shoving my hands under my armpits, I trudged through the snow, squinting in the wind. What would have been a simple thirty minutes walk was going on and on and on. I didn’t realise how much time I was spending outside, in the middle of a blizzard, underdressed despite my best intentions. After the first nips of the wind had become toothed bites, and after the worrying reddening of my ears and nose, and after the ache and stiffness in my fingers and toes – after all of this, the pain seemed to ebb slightly, its stingy melody muting itself little by little. Without pain and without feeling, the fear mounted.</p><p>I was already experiencing frostnip. But surely your house had to be near by then. I couldn’t be lost. Or could I?</p><p>I trudged on, on, onwards. Slower and slower. I had already crossed the border; I was too far from home, I couldn’t go back. The route was straight, I couldn’t be mistaken. I had learned the way to your house and the landmarks on the map like I knew my Morse code by heart. Yet I felt the winter gnawing on me, cruelly, just when I was about to deliver the message to you.</p><p>Step after step, snowflake after snowflake. Three miles. Three miles…</p><p>Until finally, the wind died down, I blinked twice and <em>There he is</em>, I thought. <em>There you are.</em></p><p>Snowflakes twirling and dotting your red hair like fickle fairy lights. Tall and thin like a telegraph pole under layers upon layers of warm clothes. Limbs full of energy and a spring in your step. Despite the hazy bites of the blizzard, I couldn't have been more certain.</p><p>
  <em>There he is. There you are.</em>
</p><p>All I had to do now was to deliver those nine words and four stops.</p><p>“ARMISTICE SIGNED STOP WAR IS OVER STOP CEASE FIRE STOP OPEN BORDERS STOP”</p><p>Yes, dearheart, there you were, shovelling snow away from your house, already at work after the snowstorm. You spotted me coming closer, you waited some seconds; then you ran to me, and I collapsed onto you, straight into your arms.</p><p>“Armistice signed,” I breathed out with all the strength I could summon. “War is over. Cease fire. Open borders.”</p><p>And then you <em>knew</em> me. I saw it in your eyes. I saw them widen in recognition, in a controlled wave of panic. Black round pupils surrounded by irises that, in the frost-nipped back of my mind, looked like steaming tea…</p><p>“You <em>fool</em>.” You dragged me inside, careful but quick, managing to hug me inexplicably all the while. “Couldn’t you have waited the end of the blizzard at least?” I was hearing your voice for the first time then. Low and raspy and jumpy and yours.</p><p>I blacked out smiling.</p><p>-----------</p><p>When I came to my senses again, the next things I noticed were, in order: I was naked; a warm blanket; a soft bed; a lit stove; you in the corner.</p><p>As soon as you saw I’d woken up, you jumped up from the chair you’d been sitting on and came to kneel next to me.</p><p>“Aziraphale,” you said. “Aziraphale. Angel.” It was all you could say for a whole minute, with a smile that couldn’t quite reach your eyes.</p><p>Your breath was shaking, like <em>you</em> were the one whose frostnip had been about to become frostbite.</p><p>“Sent for a doctor, earlier… Luckily he came quick,” you said, looking away. “He told me what to do. You’re ok now, but he said you need to rest for a couple of days more and- and, oh God…”</p><p>It hurt, to see you so worried. Until then, I hadn’t realised yet that perhaps I wasn’t welcome in your house at all, that you had saved me only for human decency. There I was, uninvited and unwell after the biggest snowstorm in years, when there was surely so much work to do. I wanted to apologize, but I wasn’t sure how.</p><p>Meanwhile, to calm down, you went in the kitchen to brew some tea. You stayed away some time, but when you came back, the smile on your lips had disappeared completely, swept away by a determined frown.</p><p>“Here.” Sitting down on the bed beside me, you handed me the cup of tea. Gently golden, comforting, warming: the exact colour of your eyes. “Drink this. But slowly,” you warned as soon as you saw me a tad too eager to gulp that liquid colour down.</p><p>And again and again, under your attentive watch, those fingers made to tap relentlessly helped me take the cup to my lips, and I sipped little by little. Your warmth and care flowed into me together with that tea.</p><p>You set the cup aside. For some time, you stared at the faint light of a streetlamp that cast yellow trapezes on the floor through the window. A lock of your hair fell form its position and started dangling on your forehead, like a pendulum. Then you lifted your face to look at me. I saw determination and concern and a spruce of anger; I gripped the covers, bracing, sensing what was about to come.</p><p>“Aziraphale,” and your voice forced my eyes closed. “Aziraphale, what the Hell were you doing out there, coming here on foot in the middle of a fucking blizzard?”</p><p>I cracked one eye open just to see you rub your face with your hands, breathing slowly. For some reason, it hurt. I closed my eye again.</p><p>“What were you thinking? Being out there, playing the hero?”</p><p>Five seconds.</p><p>“You could have almost frozen to death.”</p><p>“Let’s not exaggerate now. I’m perfectly alright.” I’d have liked my voice to be more decisive or reassuring. A full stop, either way. It wasn’t.</p><p>“Please… don’t. Just- just stop that.”</p><p>You strip all pretences away from my words, Anthony, you flay me open and leave me to face the truth with you. Like you did that night.</p><p>“You have no idea…”</p><p>Five other seconds. I heard ragged breaths from a throat that sounded full of water.</p><p>“You have no fucking idea how <em>scared</em> I was when I saw you. To lose you…” I heard a nail on a blackboard, “just after I’d finally met you.”</p><p>I found no better answer than to say, “Forgive me,” and to take your hand. You squeezed it back. It was the right thing to say.</p><p>You are an energetic man. You must always have something to do, something on your hands; something to keep you from biting your nails and making them bleed.</p><p>So you knelt silently on the floor next to me, took my foot out from under the cover and started rubbing it with slow circles. First with a warm towel that you took from above the stove, then with your bare hands. Without another word.</p><p>I watched mesmerised as colour flowed from your fingertips back into my skin; you painted a foot, then the other. You passed on to my hands.</p><p>Your hand rubbed loving lines into my fingers, careful circles on my knuckles and palms and backs, until the worrying paleness was gone and they were warm again. It took you a little while; the cold had threatened to bite me more deeply than it seemed.</p><p>Not a day goes by that I don't think about those moments. Your nails didn't bleed then, don't bleed now.</p><p>(<em>I was a stranger and you welcomed me.</em>)</p><p>I spent that day moving around the house with your help, letting you help me eat. My limbs were fine by then, but I was still a little fatigued. We uprooted my weariness together, little by little.</p><p>The next evening I could finally sit up on the bed by myself. Again you were there beside me, and again you took my hand. You were more careful than before, though.</p><p>“Feeling better,” you said, studying my fingers from all sides.</p><p>I smiled. “Quite.”</p><p>“No more frostnip. No more fatigue.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>You nodded and let go of my hand.</p><p>I cleared my throat. Something was stuck in my windpipe, one last knot of barbed wire. “I think I… shouldn’t impose further. I’ve come to deliver the message, and I did. Now I’m fine. I’d hate to be any more of… of an inconvenience to you.”</p><p>Your eyes squinted as they grasped for meaning, searching into mine. “You… an inconvenience?”</p><p>“Yes,” I said, and I could have broken down any second under your gaze. But I went on; I had to deliver <em>this </em>message too. “All I’m saying is, thank you – thank you so much for… for everything. For our conversations, and taking me in, and saving my life. I owe you that. Still, I- I could go back to my house any time now. It’s not that far, and I’m feeling well, really.” I looked down at the covers to catch my breath. “You just have to ask. I… I’d understand.”</p><p>My hands were shaking. How inappropriate, for a telegraphist, these tremors that make your fingers slip. They can change every meaning…</p><p>You covered one of those treacherous, trembling things with your palm. I felt my hand warming up again, gently, like a butterfly in a thin cocoon.</p><p>You tilted your head in a silent invitation to look at your face. I did. I had never seen you so serious before, not even when you had brought me tea, and yet there was a far away smile on your lips; a dawn underneath a winter sky. “You can stay at my place. If you like.”</p><p>The cocoon around my hand became a little tighter but, if possible, even gentler. Suddenly your hand was shaking just as mine.</p><p>“Please, stay,” you whispered. Your voice was a broken matchstick. Your eyes were about to flood. “Stay.”</p><p>You didn’t say, <em>Without you, I’ll be lonely</em>. You didn’t say, <em>With you, I won’t be</em>. But there was no way I could be mistaken – I heard your thoughts just the same. They were there, in the open. They were mine as well.</p><p>So I smiled; you smiled too, exhaling softly. And I stayed. I’m going to.</p><p>The morning after, I got up by myself and went in the main hall. You were already there. “I have a surprise for you,” you said with a barely contained smile on your face. A smile that looked like Christmas.</p><p>You guided me next to the fireplace. From a corner of the mantelpiece, tucked against the wall, you took a small, smooth wooden box, etched along the edges. Big enough to hold a carillon, but not as heavy.</p><p>“Open it,” you said, and you handed it to me.</p><p>The hinges turned easily. It wasn’t a music box. Instead, I found a stack of small sheets of paper inside.</p><p>My breath stopped somewhere in my throat. I took one of the papers, lifted it up and stared at it in the light.</p><p>“My wires,” I said, turning to look at you again.</p><p>You stuffed your hands in your pockets. “Yeah.”</p><p>“You’ve… kept them all…”</p><p>“I did.”</p><p>Now tell me, Anthony, tell me how ever I couldn’t have kissed you then.</p><p>I put the box down, back on the mantelpiece, and I cupped your face in my hands. I stopped long enough to ask you for permission, but you were already tugging my rumpled shirt towards you, slowly. Just like that, we were kissing for the first time.</p><p>It was a very chaste thing. A press of lips against lips. Breathing together. Yet I remember I started to cry. Do you remember? We pressed our foreheads one against the other, and your tears joined mine. We were smiling too… But why those tears? I don't remember. I suppose it didn’t matter in the end. We were together, weren't we?</p><p>We started to laugh, and we kissed, again, again, again, and sensations started to make my head dizzy, going in and out of my mind like through a revolving door. And still we were crying – like one of those rare, sunny afternoons when it’s also drizzling, when you see a double rainbow in the distance. Eventually, it became too much, and we just stood there, holding each other tight for what was probably a very long time.</p><p>(<em>I was naked and you clothed me.</em>)</p><p>You were the one who saved me, dearest, took off my half frozen clothes, layer after layer, wrapped me up and tucked me in your bed. Your house is big, but strong is your warmth, and I've never felt shame in being naked around you.</p><p>I've always been soft around the middle. Never one to give up on food when I could indulge. Still you made no remark ever. Sometimes you run your palm or your fingers on my stomach. Your eyes glisten with something halfway through awe and pride. "Angel," your happy voice says. "My soft angel." A finger trails up and down on the small path of hairs there. "My angel who faced a blizzard-" there's a kiss to my navel; it tickles, "-to tell me that the war was over."</p><p>I have always considered myself far from what any angelic creature could be. I'm an introvert and a bit of a bastard, sometimes, but only as a self-defence mechanism. "He doesn't make friends easily," my teacher used to say, when I tried to make friends at school and I would end up alone, or crying in a puddle of rain on the ground.</p><p>Hard as I tried to overcome my limits, nothing ever worked. My mother and father had given up on my awkwardness long before my teachers did, and I had to start forging my path in life by myself. First as a mailman, then a part-time librarian, and in my free time I studied the subtle art of sending wires and cables. My precision and ability earned me a place in my town’s station, but they weren’t enough to earn the respect or the sympathies of my colleagues. I knew that. I could almost see the sneers and hear the snickers behind my back. <em>Poor Mr Fell. Always by himself. There must be something wrong with him, mustn’t it?</em></p><p>After the start of the war, I was transferred where you know. And I was still alone.</p><p>Until there was you. You with your own loneliness; a mirror of mine. Too high above anyone else’s opinion of you to really blend in. I, by contrast, tried too hard to be like everyone else. Another thing I’m still learning from you, my dearest, like an open book. You do not care about looks in the slightest, not in everyday life nor working. And why should you? What really matters is the core. You’re teaching me silently day after day.</p><p>The first time I saw you at work, tapping away and sending wires, I had just woken up from one of the naps I would make on the living room couch after my recovery. The line was still being fixed where the pole had fallen down; and we’d received a letter in which my head office declared, given my fatigue, that I was to be on sick leave until fully recovered. You were there, at your station, impossibly focussed, shooting words out into the night at the speed of sound.</p><p>From the couch I was lying on, I saw you piled up on an uncomfortable-looking chair, all compressed in weird angles like a foldable yardstick. Your chin was resting on one knee, the other leg folded and tucked on the seat. You, of course, were biting the nails of your free hand in your effort to tap true to your fist, as fast and as accurate as possible.</p><p>From the couch I was lying on, I remember seeing that you were wearing what I discovered to be your grandmother's purple shawl. Tiny yellow flowers, green vines, red apples. Fringes. It made you look vulnerable, more than I was in my recovery. It does look lovely on your shoulders. I look forward to the moment you'll wear it again.</p><p>From the couch I was lying on, I remember thinking three things.</p><p>One: He doesn’t realise how gorgeous he is.</p><p>Two: That posture will be the ruin of his back in five years’ time. Maybe less. It won’t do.</p><p>Three: I wonder if, <em>that</em> stormy night, he was crumpled up like this on that chair.</p><p>Storms were meant to draw us together. Not only blizzards, though; there was another stormy night that I remember with particular vividness. Its colours often drip on the canvas of my mind’s eye, leaving indelible traces on it.</p><p><em>That</em> stormy night there was a steady silence in official communications from both sides. Clouds and rain danced outside. It was already several months into our acquaintance (was it? How fast time flies). Just three miles away from each other, two tiny stations inside two houses, the wire to connect them and barbed wire in between.</p><p>“14”<sup><a href="#_ftn11" id="_ftnref11" name="_ftnref11">[11]</a></sup></p><p>you asked out of the blue. (But you must have known the answer already.)</p><p>“WX 17<sup><a href="#_ftn12" id="_ftnref12" name="_ftnref12">[12]</a></sup> COLD,”</p><p>I tapped back. I was about to add some unnecessary detail, some other trimming on the rain perhaps, but you, of course, were faster.</p><p>“WARM YOU UP?”</p><p>I hesitated. That was new. (You’ve always been full of surprises.)</p><p>“I WISH,”</p><p>I tapped diplomatically. After then, your answers came gently, but straight and sure, in a crescendo of clarity.</p><p>“LET ME”</p><p>“HOW?”</p><p>“TOUCH YOU”</p><p>In my career as a telegraph operator I had never felt the need to grasp the edge of the table while I tapped until then. I looked around, as if someone else could have been there other than me. My fingers twitched in front of the key. I still wasn’t sure I’d understood what you wanted from me, or to do to me. Or with me. I had never considered anything like it before, given how far we were. And now all my dreams, all my fantasies about you that had blossomed in so many months and that I’d tried to put to silence swept me away like a tidal wave.</p><p>“C SVP<sup><a href="#_ftn13" id="_ftnref13" name="_ftnref13">[13]</a></sup>,”</p><p>I tapped slowly, deliberately. <em>My testament</em>, I thought with something resembling a wild exhilaration. I waited, and I hoped.</p><p>Some time passed. Silence, that beast, stretched its long body once again on the wire between us. Then:</p><p>“START GENTLY”</p><p>I took a sharp breath in.</p><p>“WOULD YOU?”</p><p>“ALWAYS”</p><p>And so it began. Brief sentences and beeping sounds were all I needed from beyond the stormy sky outside the window. Loud in my ears, shattering my brain, stronger than any thunderclap.</p><p>I pictured you in my mind without any visual memory of your face. I had done it already, but I had always been by myself, in the dark of a narrow bedroom. This time it was different. It felt like making love to blindness.</p><p>There were pauses in your curt instructions, sometimes, or some missing letters. I <em>knew</em> you were touching yourself too, three meagre miles away from me. Those moments of quietness, those stuttering and mismatched letters in your fist that had always been so accurate made me almost hear you.</p><p>And all the while, outside, the storm roared on. Still the beeping was always louder.</p><p>“ANGEL,”</p><p>you tapped, with careful and meaningful pauses between the letters to spell the word right.</p><p>“DARLING,”</p><p>I managed to answer back, not without stammering on the key. With a foot I pushed back against a leg of the table to get better leverage, a hand on myself and the other still gripping the wood, next to the station.</p><p>“ANGEL,”</p><p>you tapped again, and your fist – I felt it; I heard it – was soft.</p><p>It was as if you could see me. The rain poured, pounding on the roof, and the wind bellowed, scattering leaves everywhere. Still by some kind of miracle your messages to me never felt unanswered. You heard everything loud and clear, and I felt every of the letters you sent me like breaths and kisses on my nape.</p><p>“C,”</p><p>was all I could answer with my free hand at some point.</p><p>“ANGEL,”</p><p>you tapped back a third time; then, unexpectedly,</p><p>“CMNG”</p><p>I saw a lightning; I heard a thunder; and that was it.</p><p>Even in the absence of you, I knew that you were feeling the storm just like I was. Two attuned souls, united by loneliness and by the beginning of something more, overcoming storms together.</p><p>After a minute, when I was starting to look for something to clean myself with, I received another message.</p><p>“TU”</p><p>“WHY?”</p><p>A hesitation.</p><p>“WILL EXPLAIN LATER CL<sup><a href="#_ftn14" id="_ftnref14" name="_ftnref14">[14]</a></sup>”</p><p>The conversation ended there, leaving me no time to think that I could have added, as a last message, “88”<sup><a href="#_ftn15" id="_ftnref15" name="_ftnref15">[15]</a></sup>.</p><p>It was then, I think, that I finally realised that I love you; that I had and I have been loving you all this time.</p><p>(<em>I was sick and you visited me.</em>)</p><p>Still lying against me in the bathtub, our fingers interlaced, you squeeze my hand slowly like you’d do with a lemon. It hurts just a bit; it’s like you’re trying to extract its liquid essence and let it flow, drop after drop, into the sudsy water with our sweat. You need to reach what lies beneath my body, what is hidden inside my bones. It’s fascinating.</p><p>This is what took you where you were when you reached out to me. Too many questions to your parents. Too many questions at school. Too many questions at work. You just kept digging and digging and digging with the spade of your sharp need for knowledge and truth. Eventually you were sent to this big, lonely house at the end of the line, despite your prodigious skills at the wire. There was no one to send your uncomfortable questions to. Not until I answered.</p><p>You are brilliant and empathetic, but you can come off as cold initially. You are gentle and caring, and you may not talk much save for your questions. But you’re insistent. You will stop at nothing but the truth, the purest and barest essence of everything and everyone.</p><p>So when you undressed me the second time, when I was recovered and I asked you for it, you didn’t care about my clothes or my shoes or my golden pinky ring. You wanted to reach the core of the apple, and clothes were only its peel.</p><p>Your hand on my chest felt like an electric shock; my heartbeats adjusted to the new touch like a master’s call. I was certain I wouldn’t have breathed anymore. I’ve had that thought many times, that night. But from what I remember, you seemed to have the same thoughts in your obsessive, thorough search, further and further towards the core of things and the centre of my whole being.</p><p>We made love there, on the same bed we’ll be lying on tonight.</p><p>I've been living in your house long enough now to know that everything has a place here. This strange, big house, with many empty rooms and few overstuffed ones and big white sheets covering the unused furniture like a layer of snow. One room has a luxurious, comfortable, creaking bed, speaking of recovery and care. Everything has its place, and our place was there.</p><p>I was naked again, purposefully so. Once again disrobed by you. You took your clothes off, your black turtleneck disappearing first, and you stared into my eyes. You looked so fragile and determined, like a crystal knife. You carved out my heart.</p><p>You slid one finger in my mouth. Then two. Softly pressing down against my moving tongue. (Were you tapping even then? What were you saying, what did you write to me?)</p><p>What marvelous things open-mouthed breaths against a neck can do. What unbelievable sounds a tongue against a lover's skin can draw out. </p><p>You stretched yourself open in my lap with those fingers, eyes closed tight and a hand on my shoulder, while I busied myself studying your ribs. Then you sank onto me, you gorgeous thing, with a relieved sound, like that was your natural place in the world. Like you belonged, and you were coming home.</p><p>Your length rubbed, beautiful and insistent, against my stomach. A padding against the sharp edges of life, am I not, sweetheart?</p><p>I rocked up inside you following the melody of your breaths. You were warm, and closer than I ever had you before, and you called me angel until it drew us both completely out of our minds.</p><p>I’m once again dizzy at the memory of it, the sounds of it, the feeling of it. Your hair, falling on your face; me, moving a lock of it away from your forehead with a finger. A fogged-up window, a tangle of warm covers. The white of your teeth, the pink of your tongue, the red of your lips. Your spine arching as you came, your hand tugging at my hair, my toes curling as I followed you into the light.</p><p>It was real, it’s still real, it will still be.</p><p>(<em>I was in prison and you came to me</em><em>.</em>)</p><p>You’re kissing my knuckles now, in this bathtub, and I’m so happy that I have to close my eyes. It’s incredible. I open them and the miracle repeats itself – you’re still here. It wasn’t a ghost, that fast-fisted operator, that spirit that touched me through sounds during a stormy night. You’re here, you’re kissing my skin, and my head is spinning and I’m not entirely sure it’s because of the heat of the tub.</p><p>I’m overwhelmed that such a curious, compassionate man chose me, of all people. Me, among the whole human kind, to make love with and be my best friend and the love of my life. Three miles away, a border and a war diving us, and still together we have woven a story made of sounds and silences. A web, thicker and thicker, that drew us together.</p><p>I will never get tired of hearing your voice. Despite our long-awaited closeness, despite being side by side now, you aren’t one to speak much. Even now – you turn around in the tub, you look at me with your eyes of steaming tea, and you just arch your eyebrows nodding for us to get out.</p><p>But I’m grateful. Now that I can touch you, silence makes each of your words a discovery. How many new sounds can you make? How many heights and depths can your voice reach? Perhaps I’ll never know. I’ll spend my life learning. A life spent learning you… It will be wonderful.</p><p>We stagger out of the water, take the warm towels and rub each other dry. Then, still naked, with the eagerness of a fading youth you tug me to bed, you kiss me soundly, and there’s not an inch of me that seems unreachable to you anymore.</p><p>“Careful, Anthony,” I say with a laugh. “If we go on, then we’ll have to get back into the tub…”</p><p>I kiss your throat. I hear and feel you swallow under my lips, taking air in your lungs. “Sod the tub,” you say. “Want you, gorgeous. Need you, angel.” Despite everything, you like your work so much that sometimes your mind forfeits the trimmings of a sentence; you burn all the trivial things and get to the core of the message.</p><p>The long lines you trace all over me with your fingers leave trails of you in my soul. My blood pumps onwards with the cadence of an electric signal. Your need jumps over the barbed wire of our separate bodies, latches on to my heart with a steady beeping, comes to tie me to you and to shred me to bits like paper.</p><p>You have no time to bite your nails and be anxious when I kiss your fingertips slowly, one by one, and when I guide your hands to me – to secret places that open up for you, only for you.</p><p>Is it even real?</p><p>Just today, I’ll admit, I was watching you through the windowsill. You were busy in that little garden of yours. I don’t really know what plants grow between winter and spring, but that is a matter of no importance. The first flowers are blooming: they needed you, and you came to the rescue; you were there for them like you were for me.</p><p>You sank your gloved fingers into the dark, cold soil, moving it, easing it, making way. Your scarf, green as an emerald, dangled from your neck. It was in your way, but you let it be. Gentle puffs of warm air went out of your nose and your mouth, harmless smoke of invisible cigarettes twirling up and away.</p><p>I watched you gardening from a window in a moment of quietness. I don’t know if you noticed me – I think you did; you always do somehow. Regardless, you worked on; you revelled in touching the baby leaves, the sleeping buds and tiny blooms, the dark dirt. Focused. Relaxed. Happy.</p><p>Those same fingers now tap babbling, tumbling messes of words on my shoulders, as you hold me close and nuzzle my neck and open me and move inside me. Decoding those words is impossible. But there’s no need to, dove, I know what we’re both too overwhelmed to say, too coiled up in our staccato panting.</p><p>You are a man of your word. You always start gently. In truth, you are always gentle. Never rough. Not with your flowers, not with the key, not with me. We have had and seen enough roughness for a lifetime. Enough with that.</p><p>“Angel,” you exhale, you pray. Painfully ecstatic. Tonight, my beloved, we are left barely speechless. The sounds you make… They would be enough to move the stars to tears.</p><p>“Anthony.” I’ve closed my eyes. It feels like it’s too much, or not enough, or both… I can’t decide. I don’t want to decide. “Anthony… please.”</p><p>“Hush, angel,” you say, so incredibly sweet and with that smiling whisper of yours, so blinding that I wonder how, <em>how</em> in God’s name I managed to live more than forty years without hearing your voice. Such a waste of time. “Hush. You don’t have to beg. Whatever it is you want, whatever you need, I’ll give it freely to you.” So blinding that I wonder how I am still alive.</p><p>My love. You’re cradling my face in your fingers, now, like you’d do to one of your blooms in the garden. It’s caring and encouraging; you’re promising we’ll grow together, that we will have strong roots against every storm.</p><p>Tell me how I could ever not be grateful for this, after all those months spent looking for someone to really talk to. Looking for you. Tell me how in Heaven’s name I am not dead yet, how I can keep on living when you say these things and you bare your body and soul to me on an altar. As if you owed anything to me, when in truth these offerings are the most miraculous gift. <em>I’ll give it freely to you.</em></p><p>You thrust home one more time, hard. “It’s open, dove,” my voice would like to say. “No need to knock, no need to fumble for the key at night. Come in to me, come home and stay.”</p><p>There are teeth against my neck, a hand on me and a cry in the night (mine, or yours, they sound almost the same), and the world falls and it spins a little faster until it stills around us.</p><p>After that, our hands brush everywhere on each other, and we smile as the night tucks its smooth, woollen duvet on us. A sprinkle of snow begins to fall outside.</p><p>-----</p><p>My house was in the East, and you, from your house in the West, called to me.</p><p>My station was in a small house, cluttered with books and dust. Being a telegraph operator pays you well; extremely well, if you’re fast and accurate. But it’s not like you care about good things when you must enjoy them alone, when others around you are suffering.</p><p>It was me, a kitchen, a book-stacked bedroom, a bathroom and my tiny station. Dust and mould in the corners and too little space to breathe. That’s all I had.</p><p>You, sweetheart – you have a big house; you had a lonely life like mine. The village witch brought you food and provisions, just like a bright-coloured and motherly lady did to me. Three rooms at ground floor, warm and dry corners, white canvas and sheets everywhere else in the upper floor and the unused rooms. A big chimney, a well-stocked pantry. A large, slumbering garden all around that is now slowly waking up.</p><p>When you unveiled the empty shelves of the library ("We'll put your books here angel, all of them – all of them. Would you like that?"), I didn’t know what to say. Were you giving me a part of your house? A part of your life? A part of you?</p><p>The warm, polished brown of the wooden shelves was more striking than the cottoned, muted sheets covering it. You unveiled an invitation to a future. I could start filling a part of your life.</p><p>My house beyond the border still isn’t far, now that the storms of nature and men have died down. It has never been far. Three miles. I haven’t gone back there yet, though. Perhaps I never will. I’ll just keep coming and going to fetch my books, from time to time, until my bookcase will be empty and your house will be filled with them.</p><p>Then, like I promised, I’ll stay with you. With you, and your silly dark glasses shielding you from the annoying flame of the oil lamps, and the joys of our simple common life.</p><p>You are a creature of soil and greens, of pebbles in your boots and knotty logs splitting up in the embrace of a fireplace. Still I wonder what you’d look like in a tuxedo. Hair slicked back and confident shoulders, radiating light to rival a chandelier's.</p><p>We'll go to that restaurant downtown and sit at the best table, the one next to the window. "Good evening, sirs," the waiter will say, and I'll say, "Lovely place as always, good man," and he'll say, "Thank you sir, what would you like to have tonight?", and I'll say, "Today's special, if you please," and I'll wink to you, because I'll be in a silly mood.</p><p>I'll embarrass you and the waiter with a little magic trick (have I ever shown you how I can make a coin disappear?). I'll leave a generous tip. The waiter will smile, and I will see you smile too.</p><p>I’d like all the fine things, the best things for you, but I know you prefer quiet and simple joys. I’ll be the happiest man on earth if I can give them to you every day of my life. You’ve already given so much to me, and you always do. You live, therefore I am.</p><p>You're growing strawberries lately. You're also growing an anticipation in me – these won’t be like any of those berries we can buy in the big city markets, you say. They'll be small, and sweet, and brave; they’ll taste of home and of time spent doing the best things.</p><p>I'm going to make crepes for you, one of these days, once those brave little berries get red and big enough. Of course you still don't know; it’ll be a surprise.</p><p>You also don't know I have a proposal in store. There are couples like us in the big cities not too far from here. We could be like them, live as two husbands. I want nothing else than to paint the biggest smile on your face with just a few words, nothing else than the hope that you'll grant me the biggest honour, the widest joy of my life. No ceremony, no guests, nothing fancy. As a man of few words, I know that you like getting right to the point… Something tells me you'll say yes. I hope you will.</p><p>But either way, I know why I’m here with you. It’s enough. We’re already making plans, aren’t we, love? Putting our savings together, buying a property on the border. There will be two operators, two tiny stations, a thriving garden on one side, a well-endowed library on the other. A bed upstairs, over the ground. No borders to divide us there. Just us, and our friend the silence, and sounds that now have a shape and a face. You, and I, and the wire still humming in the background, between you and me.</p><p>Just us.</p><p> </p><p>(There is another line I often think about. It’s not included in the Bible, nor anywhere else, but it belongs with the others I have mentioned here.</p><p>I wrote it myself; watch closely – you will find its lines slowly drying on the pages of your soul, painted with the ink of my thoughts.</p><p>It’s ours, my beloved. It belongs to me and you.</p><p><em>I was alone, and you loved me.</em>)</p><p> </p><p> ----------------------</p><p> </p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref1" id="_ftn1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a></sup> A fist is the personal tapping style of each operator, a sort of handwriting, and it sounds immediately recognizable to telegraphists, just like a voice. <sup><a href="#_ftnref1" id="_ftn1" name="_ftn1">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref2" id="_ftn2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a></sup> CQ = general call to any station. <sup><a href="#_ftnref2" id="_ftn2" name="_ftn2">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref3" id="_ftn3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a></sup> 134 = Who is at the key? <sup><a href="#_ftnref3" id="_ftn3" name="_ftn3">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref4" id="_ftn4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a></sup> K = invitation to transmit. <sup><a href="#_ftnref4" id="_ftn4" name="_ftn4">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref5" id="_ftn5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a></sup> DE = This is from…; used to precede the name or other identification of the calling station. <sup><a href="#_ftnref5" id="_ftn5" name="_ftn5">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref6" id="_ftn6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a></sup> QTH? = What is your position? <sup><a href="#_ftnref6" id="_ftn6" name="_ftn6">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref7" id="_ftn7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a></sup> TU = Thank you. <sup><a href="#_ftnref7" id="_ftn7" name="_ftn7">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref8" id="_ftn8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a></sup> N = Negative (no). <sup><a href="#_ftnref8" id="_ftn8" name="_ftn8">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref9" id="_ftn9" name="_ftn9">[9]</a></sup> C = Confirm (yes). <sup><a href="#_ftnref9" id="_ftn9" name="_ftn9">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref10" id="_ftn10" name="_ftn10">[10]</a></sup> Originally, the word STOP was used mainly in war messages to help make the text less ambiguous. Its use in common wires became more frequent after WWI. <sup><a href="#_ftnref10" id="_ftn10" name="_ftn10">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref11" id="_ftn11" name="_ftn11">[11]</a></sup> 14 = What’s the weather like? <sup><a href="#_ftnref11" id="_ftn11" name="_ftn11">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref12" id="_ftn12" name="_ftn12">[12]</a></sup> WX = Weather report follows. 17 = Lightning here. <sup><a href="#_ftnref12" id="_ftn12" name="_ftn12">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref13" id="_ftn13" name="_ftn13">[13]</a></sup> SVP = Please (from the French “S'il vous plaît”). <sup><a href="#_ftnref13" id="_ftn13" name="_ftn13">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref14" id="_ftn14" name="_ftn14">[14]</a></sup> CL = Closing my station. <sup><a href="#_ftnref14" id="_ftn14" name="_ftn14">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p><p><sup><a href="#_ftnref15" id="_ftn15" name="_ftn15">[15]</a></sup> 88 = Love and kisses. <sup><a href="#_ftnref15" id="_ftn15" name="_ftn15">[ ▲ ]</a></sup></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The lines Aziraphale quotes throughout the fic come from Matthew 25:35-36.</p><p>The wonderful jb612 has made some stunning art for this AU. I'm in love with it, and so so grateful. Go check it out <a href="https://jb612.tumblr.com/post/633421962528620544/inspired-by-sarettons-what-hath-god-wrought-and">here</a>!</p><p>Come say hello on <a href="https://saretton.tumblr.com">Tumblr</a>. :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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